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Re: The United Kingdom General Election, 2nd May 2024
I mocked the possibility of more referendums but maybe that's what needs to be done. God we live in a strange world.
It wouldn't even have to come to that if our MP's (Members of Parliament) reject or repeal the bill. Referendums are not legally binding in the UK - hell the UK doesn't even have a constitution where referendums & majority rule on binary choices are protected by the law. All it would take would be for the representatives of the people to act. I say "all" like it's not a big deal, obviously it is a big deal & it's unlikely they would ever go against the wishes of the majority who voted. But to further complicate matters, the overwhelming majority of MP's were pro-EU & remain so in effect if they do pass the motion in Parliament they will have voted against their own wishes.
Today has just brought further recriminations & divisions. We're still in a state of confusion: we've effectively no government since Cameron's announced his resignation, his party have to have a leadership contest. The opposition are in dire straits, revolting against their own leader. & the people who were campaigning for Brexit are finally crawling out from the rocks they were hiding behind only to spout further lies & renege again on the promises they made in the campaign.
All the while xenophobic & racist attacks are already reportedly on the rise while the rest of us bicker amongst ourselves.
John Donne
Meditation 17
Devotions upon Emergent Occasions
No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
- Randall Flagg
- Rep: 139
Re: The United Kingdom General Election, 2nd May 2024
There's a TV show that got filmed here with the help of EU funding, in return for boosting tourism...
I'm sure no one here watches it though
.
i read that the EU portion of the funding for GoT got pulled years ago and the past few seasons have gotten tax exemptions solely from the UK.
Re: The United Kingdom General Election, 2nd May 2024
So basically your government is currently the proverbial chicken with its head cut off. Unreal and is actually dangerous. A nuclear state should never be in such dire straits.
What if a major economic, politicial, or military crisis happens in the coming weeks? Can and will the UK be able to deal with it? A major crisis requires unity and sound judgment at the least. They're lacking in both departments right now.
The Continent of Europe can not field a theater defense. Their armies are small, lack seasoning, and the linguistic and logistic differences would make mounting any kind of coordinated movements would be hard. Outside of Germany, there's just not anything there.
That is scary.
If I were president I would beef up our presence there.....specifically POland. You cant walk through Europe without steamrolling Poland. Give Putin a reason to not even consider it for laughs. I thought we should've had troops there during the Ukraine crisis. Now we really need them there. Doing so could send the wrong message and maybe make it worse but IMO its a risk worth taking.
I know we have a token amount of forces in some of those countries but I'm referring to a larger contingency here. We have a carrier group in the region but send another one.
Speaking of carrier groups, that's another reason the Brits would be up shit creek without a paddle in the event of a Falklands crisis. The Royal navy is a shell of its former self. What are they gonna do....ask to borrow one of ours? 
They'd go through hell on earth transporting a token force to the region and have no way of actually bombing either the Falklands or key targets. I need to research this subject again. I'll do it if/when my health scare is over. In the event of Argentina taking the Falklands, can the Brits invoke article 5 to get the US and France to do the heavy lifting?
Noel Gallagher said it best on the subject, he said why let the people vote? 99% of them are thick as pig shit
Sad but true.
- Randall Flagg
- Rep: 139
Re: The United Kingdom General Election, 2nd May 2024
I don't know if it's fair to suggest the UK couldn't handle a major event. It's not as if their government collapsed and there's no one there to lead. They voted to leave the EU. No more, no less.
They still have a Prime minister and all of his ministers. The banks, industry and commerce are running as usual. Sure the market took a dip, but it's not as if there's a famine and people are searching for food like in Venezuela.
If something happened, the sitting government would act. Just as if something happened to the US after the election before Obama left office.
Re: The United Kingdom General Election, 2nd May 2024
I reread that and it does sound like I'm saying the government has been decapitated and isn't functioning. I didn't mean it to that extent but when you have a government in such chaos that they have no clue whatsoever on how to move forward on this EU situation, it does not breathe confidence into the situation if something else were to occur in the coming weeks/months.
Yeah I walked right into that zinger neemo. On a serious note in that regard, even with the US up to its neck in partisan gridlock, in the event of a crisis both sides usually hit the pause button on that nonsense, at least behind closed doors.
Re: The United Kingdom General Election, 2nd May 2024
the Brits would be up shit creek without a paddle.
My favourite writer/journalist over here has similiar sentiments, I think this captures the scene as well as anyone has. There's a few references that might go over the heads of people on the outside but in general you should catch the gist of the fuck-uppery that's happening:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr … m-promises
Britain faces leaderless turmoil. But don’t worry, Boris is back from the cricket
Marina Hyde
You’d think leave’s career fibbers would have a plan to get out of the lies they told before the referendum. Instead they say they’ve had enough of promises
Nothing indicates quite what a bloody nose the referendum was for the establishment like discovering that Boris Johnson spent Sunday playing cricket with Earl Spencer and writing his £250,000 a year column for the Daily Telegraph. Given that the victory speech he and Michael Gove made on Friday looked more like a hostage video, the chief purpose of Johnson’s column seemed to be to assure Britain he had Taken Back Control of his sphincter muscles.
Amusingly, after the emotive and divisive campaign he headed, Johnson’s team were briefing that he would be running for the Tory leadership as a “unity candidate” – Unity Mitford?
According to reports, Tory chiefs are clearing his path to the leadership by scrapping potential stumbling blocks like the proposed mandatory inclusion of a woman candidate on the shortlist, and are timetabling the contest for before 2 September, with that speed thought to favour the favourite. “The pound is stable,” explained Johnson, minutes before the pound was revealed to have fallen to a 31-year low, on a morning of financial activity we’ll call Episode V: The Experts Strike Back.
Meanwhile, former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie is perhaps the most prominent voice to have confessed to regretting his vote in Thursday’s referendum. The high priest of Up Yours Delors is just one of countless leave voters suffering red pill remorse, who are urgently seeking to get in touch with Morpheus to ask if they can be plugged back into the Matrix at his earliest convenience. Someone needs to level with them: Morpheus isn’t coming. Morpheus shorted red pills as soon as the markets opened. Morpheus has pulled his leather trenchcoat business from the UK and is now operating out of Frankfurt.
Given the sense of utterly leaderless turmoil, Britain spent the weekend contemplating a bizarre thought experiment: are there circumstances in which it would be comforting to clap eyes on George Osborne? The chancellor finally broke cover on Monday morning. Interspersed with the argument that austerity had put the economy in a position of strength were coded hints of cuts, suggesting that sections of the public are soon to find out the answer to the question: “What does the economy have to do with the public?” A ComRes survey during the penultimate week of the campaign found 61% of voters declaring themselves willing to accept a short-term economic slowdown to tighten immigration controls, but 68% unwilling to see their personal annual income negatively affected at all to achieve the same.
That leave had no agreed plan on Brexit, meanwhile, feels like just one of the WTF-tinged elements of our new reality. But as career fibbers, you’d think they’d at least have had an agreed plan on how to get out of the lies they’d told during the campaign. Instead, the public has been treated to a parade of junior leave personnel effectively explaining that Britain had had enough of promises. Most wince-inducing was Iain Duncan Smith, who explained to Andrew Marr: “Our promises were a range of possibilities.” That’s right – think of them as colour swatches, paint samples – a sort of pledge moodboard. And try not to notice that Britain’s walls are today decorated less appealingly than those of H-block in 1978.
Scrawled on the Polish Social and Cultural Centre (PSOK) in London’s Hammersmith, founded by the generation of Poles who fought alongside Britain in the second world war, was graffiti the police are investigating as racist. And the reaction of Arron Banks, the multi-millionaire businessman who bankrolled Leave.EU? “What’s a psok cultural centre when it’s at home?” As predicted, the provisional wing of the leave campaign has been wildly emboldened by this victory. I suspect that last week Banks wouldn’t have said that out loud; this week he seems to regard himself as having purchased the right to.
As for Labour, the rolling pageant of departures from Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, and the countermoves against them, frequently resembled an episode of Game of Thrones re-enacted by the Teletubbies. To hear some of the jobs that were being resigned from was to discover that they had existed at all. Alex Cunningham is no longer shadow minister for the natural environment. I think Diane Abbott was made shadow Magneto. It was unclear whether the new shadow defence secretary, Clive Lewis, would make defence questions in the Commons on Monday afternoon on account of the fact he was on his way back from Glastonbury. (No one analyses modern political life in the way many normal people would like, so we’ll probably never know what percentage of Labour MPs and financial services experts are firefighting today’s events on a Glasto comedown. But a non-scientific estimate places the number at “more than you’d prefer”.)
The departing shadow leader of the house, Chris Bryant, told the BBC he thought Corbyn might actually have plumped for leave, given he refused to say which way he voted when Bryant asked. Yet on the Labour leader clings, his mulish cabal citing the mandate given by his landslide election in a leadership contest that now feels like it happened about 12 years ago. At this stage in Corbyn’s journey, endless references to The Mandate are beginning to sound creepily reverential. Jeremy Corbyn and The Mandate Family. The Reverend Mandate. I salute Corbyn for being that rare thing: a soft-spoken egomaniac who doesn’t have sex with his own followers. But I concede that there will be those who think he can’t even lead a cult properly in this regard.
Where now? A few weeks ago, Johnson assured us that “sunlit meadows” lay beyond a leave vote. Instead, we are – as everyone keeps saying for want of more specific coordinate – in “uncharted territory”. And yet, you get the feeling that when the cartographers eventually come to mark this place, the word “creek” will be involved.
Re: The United Kingdom General Election, 2nd May 2024
Brexit campaigner Andrea Leadsom on verge of putting herself forward for Tory leadership
ANDREA Leadsom is understood to be on the verge of putting her name forward to be the next leader of the Tories as a “true Brexiteer" candidate.
By David Maddox, Exclusive
PUBLISHED: 00:01, Tue, Jun 28, 2016
Senior Tories have told the Express that they are prepared to back Ms Leadsom with a team of senior Brexit campaigners such as former defence secretary Liam Fox, former shadow Home Secretary David Davis and Grassroots Out founder Peter Bone behind her.
Ms Leadsom, who is the same age as Margaret Thatcher when she became Tory leader, is understood to be considering whether to run and gauging support for a leadership campaign.
The Daily Express has learnt that she has been contacted by at least one major Tory donor who has urged her to run.
A senior figure said: “It seems clear now that the people around Boris want a ‘Brexit lite' government which will not deliver what the people of this country have voted for.
“Andrea had a fantastic campaign and she is the best potential candidate from the true Brexiteers who can challenge Boris."
Ms Leadsom rose to the fore after her remarkable performances in the ITV and BBC Wembley referendum debates.
Her steely but positive approach was widely praised and took her from being a fringe figure to a major figure in the Vote Leave campaign.
Many commentators believed she outperformed the former London Mayor on both occasions and showed she had the ability to reach out to undecided voters.
Another senior Tory source said: “We need a unified candidate to push the true Brexit message for it.
“We have to have a Prime Minister who will negotiate a trade deal but will not give way on free movement.
“People in this country voted to end free movement and mass immigration and that needs to be respected."
It is understood that if Ms Leadsom decides not to run then Dr Fox or Mr Davis, both former leadership candidates, are likely to be the popular choices of the Brexit campaigners who are not in Mr Johnson's camp.
Re: The United Kingdom General Election, 2nd May 2024
I cannot believe that.
If middle England seriously vote for the posh English school teacher who looks down the peasants, speaks condescendingly to people, is full of lies and has a aura of evil about her... something is very, very wrong.
I seen her in the debates, what a terrible person. She's the kind of person who you'd assume only exists in American films with an evil rich English aristocrat. Their'll be riots on the streets with someone like her as PM.
Re: The United Kingdom General Election, 2nd May 2024
Just seen Independence Day 2 which of course came out on the day of the referendum result. Farage/Boris basically quoted president Bill Pullman in their speeches that people applauded for some reason.
The thing is, in the sequel... London get's blown to pieces in one of the most stupid plot whole-filled films I've ever seen. It was so bad, it literally made my head hurt at various points. I say this as someone who had a little bit of a soft nostalgic spot for it, since I was kid when the original came out.
I regret spending money on it. I think I'm in the depression part of the 5 stages of grief now.
